Hope

Last evening, my daughter, granddaughter, and I watched several episodes of Anne Rice’s “An Interview with a Vampire.” It’s a strange venue to discuss the difficulty of maintaining a sense of morality in a hedonistic and selfish world, but as with any great novelist, she makes it work. I haven’t read the book, and I probably won’t, but the longer we watch, the more I appreciate what she is trying to communicate to a self-indulgent society. It truly is difficult to hang on to an understanding of life that is based on kindness, community, sharing, caring, but even when we feel as if we are alone in what we value, as the main character does as he refuses to kill humans to drink the blood he needs to live, what we do matters. It is vitally important that we maintain another way, even though society has never really taken it, and most likely never will. There is an important role for those who stand against the predominant lusts of humanity.

After the others left or went upstairs and I had taken my bedtime pills, I switched to my new favorite genre, documentaries. This time I watched one called “Unknown” about a newly discovered species found in a cave in South Africa that falls under the classification of homo, or human-like, but is hundreds of thousands of years older than the next oldest skeleton archaeologists have found. What amazed the archaeologists and anthropologists was that this ancient species not only walked upright and had five digit hands, but they had created stone tools, inscribed art on the cave walls, and buried their dead, all evidence of thinking, and being emotional, even spiritual beings. Whatever resulted in their demise, new life forms inevitably followed that have taken their place.

All of this gives me hope that even if we humans destroy ourselves in our greed and pursuit of power and luxury, that life in some form will continue. After all, even though we have large brains and are capable of accomplishing many wondrous things, we are still part of the animal kingdom and subject to the same laws of survival as the rest. It seems obvious to me that God, or whatever Higher Power has set the universe into motion, has shown great imagination in its power to create and unleash forces that lead to some form of life. I am absolutely confident that even if we destroy ourselves through global warming, that in the dark recesses of earth, life will remain. Like that early species, the Nateli, I think they are called, I live in awe of this universe we live in and gives me life. The older I get, the more I appreciate just how important it is to recognize myself existing only as long as I choose to live in harmony with others. And for that I am supremely grateful.